When users click on the BuySmartJapan banner on the products page, they’re taken to the new website where they can purchase that product [1]. BuySmartJapan will purchase the product from Japanese stores on behalf of the consumer and then ship it overseas.

Kakaku.com is a comprehensive review portal strong in electronics, but it covers other things including insurance and travel plans. Its monthly pageviews exceed nine hundred million with over 45 million monthly users. Of this number, over one million are users residing outside of Japan. Many stores posted on the site do not ship to outside of Japan, and the new business was started to solve this inconvenience.

In addition to credit card and Paypal, other accepted payment methods for this new site will be AliPay (offered by China’s Alibaba) and China-UnionPay. This is perhaps a good indication that this initiative is, in part, directed at serving Chinese consumers.

In addition to international shipping, the site has also added shopping carts in English, Chinese, and Korean. Kakaku.com now ships to Japan as well as 120 countries outside of Japan.

Besides its price comparison site, Kakaku operates a range of internet services, including Cena, a Japanese equivalent to OpenTable. Readers may recall back in September when we wrote about its restaurant review site Tabelog and how its premium business model is skyrocketing.

Editor’s note: We’re in Japan and we’re not certain that this process is yet in place. Surfing Kakaku using a US IP address does not yet show BuySmartJapan banners in our initial test. ↩

Yukari is a tech writer based in Tokyo, with previous experience working with a few startups in Japan. She also supervised the Japanese caption and narration of the movie “Social Network”. She aspires to contribute to Japanese startup scene by what she does best: writing. Find her on Twitter, at @yukari77.